Linking Key Children to Staff

In this tutorial we’ll look at how to set up Key Children for staff on your account. Once you’ve done this you’ll have the option to restrict your staff from seeing non-key children, and staff and managers can also use page filters to view only their key children. You can use the tabs above to navigate to the relevant part of this tutorial.

Setting key children can be helpful for managing all of the children on your account. For example, if specific staff members only observe and assess specific children, you can set it so they only see the children they need to see. If you are in a school, you may want to set up the class Teacher as the key person for the children in their class.

Setting up key children can also be useful as an organisation tool, outside of restricting staff access. You can find a small set of children quickly, for example, when adding observations. And you will be able to filter children by key person on many pages, such as the monitoring screens.

Please note that you will need to be a manager staff user on the account to link key children and to restrict other staff’s view. Any staff user type can set their own page filters.

Firstly, before restricting views or setting page filters, you’ll want to link the key children to staff. You can do this by going to Configuration > Staff > Manage Staff.

From here, there are two ways you can view and set key children. We’ll look at using the Manage Key Children Page first, and then see how this can also be done by editing staff individually.

Manage Key Children page

Click on Manage Key Children to view and edit key children.

Here you can see your staff and any key children they have. To amend their key children click on the Edit Relationships button next to the relevant staff member.

This will open up the child picker. Add a tick next to the name of the children that you’d like to add as the key children.

You can use the filters along the top and the search bar to quickly find the relevant child/ren.

Once you’ve made your selections click on Done.

You’ll then see the children showing as that staff member’s key children.

Edit individual staff

As an alternative to using the Manage Key Children button, you can also view and add key children to staff members individually.

From the same Manage Staff page, click on the Edit button for the staff member that you’d like to amend the key children of.

Scroll down to the bottom of the staff edit page, and under the ‘Key Children’ heading click on Attach new child. Scroll through the child list and click on relevant child to link them.

Once you’ve made your selection/s you’ll see the children under the ‘Key Children’ heading. Once you’re done click Save.

You’ll then be taken back to the Manage Staff page where you’ll see confirmation of the edit, and can see that the staff member now has key children.

Now that you’ve linked your staff members and key children together, you can go on to restrict staff access to these key children only, and also set your filters to show key children only by default. We’ll look at both of these actions in the next sections of this tutorial.

Now that you’ve set staff’s key children, we’ll take a look at how you can restrict their view and access to just those key children.

As this is done by setting user permissions, and managers are permitted to do everything on the account, this can only be done by managers to non-manager staff users (full and PIN only staff).

Any managers or other staff users wanting to set their default filters can have a look at the next tab in this tutorial to see how this is done.

Go to Configuration > Staff > Staff User Permissions.

Once you’re on the User Permissions page, go into the Children section (just below Observations and Memos) and here you’ll find the permission for viewing childing who are not key children.

You can see the default permission, which in this case is permitted, and any individual permissions that have been set for specific staff members. Click on Edit to make changes to this permission.

When editing this permission you can set the default permission at the top to impact all staff members as either Permitted or Not Permitted (Remember: this applies to Full Staff and PIN Only staff members only).

To ensure staff can only view their key children you’ll want to select Not Permitted.

As well as setting the default permission, you can also set a different permission for individual staff members.

All staff will begin with the default permission that has been set at the top, or you can change this for certain staff members by selecting the options of Permitted or Not Permitted to the right of their name.

For example, if you want to allow just one member of staff to see all children then you can set the default to Not Permitted and then select Permitted for just that staff member.

Once you’ve made your changes click on Save to apply the new user permission.

After saving, you’ll go back to the User Permissions page and can see the permission has been updated.

In the next section of this tutorial we’ll take a look at how staff and managers can set their own default page filters to view only their key children.

If you’re a manager, or a full account/PIN only staff member who is allowed to see all children, then you can set the page filters across Tapestry to show you results only for your key children by default.

If you turn this on then the results shown on the main tabs, such as the observations list and children page, will only relate to your key children. When you add posts, such as observations, then all of the children will still show up to add, but your key children will be at the top to quickly select.

If you set this without having any key children assigned to you, most of the pages will show no results until you change your filters. Please refer to this section of this tutorial to see how to link key children.

To set your preferences you’l need to login to the browser version of Tapestry, click your name in the top right, and then go to Account Preferences.